Last night I was at a Sydney underground venue, which shall remain nameless here. I played in a larger (8-piece) modern jazz ensemble: some well written original music by Glenn Doig featuring wonderful jazz players from the younger side of the Sydney scene. Before our performance, there was a terrific solo set by Carl Dewhurst. The audience was small by commercial standards – maybe 30 people – but on the large side for this particular venue (I’ve certainly played there before to much fewer people). This venue sells no consumables, and audiences pay a set fee which is distributed to the performers. The venue operators choose to run their space ‘underground’ for a number of reasons; not the least of which is that planning legislation and real estate prices in NSW combine into a extremely prohibitive atmosphere for venues. The traditional model in this environment, and the one that the NSW government seems to favour, is to run performances as an aside to some other core business: food and drink generally, the logic being that booze and dinner – or coffee and cake – will pay for itself and the overheads generated by licensing and building regulations. The principal problem with this as I see it is that these enterprises are not necessarily scale-able. The is a fairly high entry point, in terms of costs and viable turnover.
Last week we learned that QIRKZ, an amazing venue I have tweeted about before, was unequivocally shut down by Marrickville Council. QIRKZ had been operating under the square’s radar for some time, and politically minded people will no doubt argue that regardless of the value, making any statement by carrying on an illegal activity is the wrong way to do things. However, QIRKZ was able to present music in a manner that no legit venue in this city can provide. Although unsubsidised by alcohol or food sales, QIRKZ and other underground venues have the ability to take risks in programming that venues with higher overheads and much more at stake can not afford to take. Also, without out commercial overheads and profit motive, they can allow flexibility in terms of performance format, hours and a place where minors can happily enjoy live music performance. Plus it had vibe. The irony is that many bands who do pull reasonably large audiences still gravitate towards these venues because the absence of commercial motives changes the atmosphere, dramatically.
If the above conflicts are a mystery to you it goes something like this: in this example the building QIRKZ occupies is designated a small factory: to legitimately alter that classification in any way with the local governing council requires a lengthy and expensive process called a Development Application. In addition, ostensibly for safety reasons, a legitimate performance venue faces much more restrictive (and therefore expensive) building regulations in regards to the number, size and manner of safety features such as fire exits. All common sense, you say, until you learn that one property apparently fit for 50-100 employees is not fit for 50-100 audience members. Or that a fire exit in a property is suitable for cafe, but it requires renovations costing $10k to move said exit one inch to operate as a venue. Possible hyperbole aside, you get the idea. From memory the estimated costs of required alterations to the QIRKZ venue ran well into the tens of thousands of dollars.
Recently another notorious and beloved underground venue, 505, was ‘legitimised’, a process that involved moving the brand and operation to a new premises that was already covered by the appropriate regulations and sanctioned by the Sydney Council (which had long been aware of the venue but chose a constructive avenue to deal with it). In a sense, this was a big win for the scene, and for the operators Cameron Undy and his partner Kerrie, who in various projects have done much for music in Sydney. But the fact remains that Cam and Kerrie now face higher overheads, probably less freedom in their curatorship, and that minors as an audience present a potentially sticky problem, as the new 505 is licensed to sell alcohol.
Individual venues and operators aside, the issues here are important to audiences and performers:
1) Outside these illegitimate venues, there is a dearth of options for under-18s who wish to attend something related to the current improvised or jazz scene in Sydney. SIMA at the Seymour Centre is an option, and I promote it to my students as often as possible, but it’s a little too expensive, too late and probably just a little too square for the kids. Options for people who find club or bar environments abhorrent (something the government presumably considers un-Australian) are similarly few and far between.
2) there are niche-genres within all kinds of music that involve small but devoted audiences. These niches are active, valuable, and feed musicians and musical innovations to more mainstream genres, but they are not financially viable where venue-hire, commercial overheads or pretty much any other cost is applied. I feel it’s important that someone can hold an solo improv set somewhere for ten people. Or that an artist who gets 80 people through the door can actually pay their band, rather than see the door takings swallowed whole by the clubs overheads (a recent experience of mine).
There is a real habit in NSW of further marginalising any performance genre or artist who is not immediately appealing to 200 or more ticket-buyers. Because under that roughly that number no-one gets paid, the band goes home and the venue considers it a dud night (except possibly for the Macquarie Hotel, who seem to do wonders with their danceable line-up of soul and funk bands). And yes plenty of musicians will do it for the love, so to speak, but that’s not necessarily sustainable. Why shouldn’t a small audience base be sustainable and financially viable for all concerned? A popular culture fairytale of a brief period underground, before emerging triumphant with ARIAs, a lengthy and well-attended national tour and healthy online single sales shouldn’t be the only version of success and this world is choc-full of musicians who have succeeded in making a valuable statement and a measurable impact, but who don’t have viable audiences by commercial standards.
Lucian McGuiness is a musician. He plays trombone. He runs a media lab and studio for Sydney music-makers called Impermanent. He teaches academic classes at AIM. The jury is still out on his Masters thesis.
Nice article. Move to Castlemaine and open a venue at the bottom of an abandoned mine shaft with me.
Might seem off on a tangent but there’s a great book by Deepak Raja called “Hindustani Music” in which Deepak (a musicologist and an economist) shows that the woeful state of Hindustani music has been caused by the people he calls “connoisseurs” – the educated, middle class minority who like the music. They have let the artform down by refusing to pony up on the ticket prices.
Using the World Bank inflation graphs as a guideline, he shows that the inflation of ticket prices has nowhere near kept up with inflation in general. So, while the connoisseurs represent a solid market demand, they are a bunch of cyphers who are more than willing to spend hundreds of dollars on the latest GaGa tickets for their teenage children while refusing to shell out for the stuff they supposedly treasure.
I reckon you’re right Luc: there should be room for a music-only space in Sydney and the reason why it’s not currently possible might be that Sydney (and it’s probably true round the world) jazz connoisseurs don’t pay enough at the door.
Having said that, I have no proof. We kept the Sagacious Arts gigs cheap as and we still only averaged 40-odd payers per gig.
I’ve just emailed you, so excuse the repetition, but my 15yo son and I have just returned from NYC, where we spent 2 fabulous weeks immersed in the local jazz scene (and eating enormous plates of food!). Despite what some might consider more draconian licensing laws – legal drinking age of 21 – or perhaps because of this, my son was able to accompany me to nearly all the places we wanted to go. We went to Highline Ballroom for 2 fantastic New Orleans bands, one of which included junior Neville family members, Smalls, Fatcats, Barbes, Solo Kitchen, 55Bar, someone’s basement in Williamsburg and some other warehouse in Brooklyn somewhere and a great comedy club called Upright Citizens Brigade Theatre. Bars, clubs, cellars, restaurants, cafes – a variety of types of venues.
We saw some blindingly great music (if anyone gets the chance to see an Israeli double bass player called Omer Avital – don’t miss it, we saw him with Joel Frahm, Avishai Cohen & Jonathon Blake at Smalls, 3 sets, finished at 1.30am, $20 in the door & $10 for the kid.), Stephane Wrembel at Barbes, the famous Slavic Soul Party etc etc. But we met some lovely people (including a few Aussies) who were all happy to tell us about other gigs and venues, my son (a drummer) had a couple of jams, with some really good players – and we were just starting to get into the swing of it when our holiday finished.
There were a couple of rock venues he wasn’t allowed into – The Mercury Lounge and the Knitting Factory being 2, and many venues we didn’t get a chance to get to.
Not only were all the places we went completely fine with him being there with me, there were also no talkers, no drunks and in many places the only payment consisted of money in a jar for the band.
My son has great teachers and a great music program at his school – but I honestly think those 2 weeks in NY were worth a year here just having lessons, jamming with his friends, playing in the school band and hardly ever seeing live jazz in terms of inspiring him creatively and technically. The chance to jam with professional, good, improvisational musicians was incredible – in the 20 minutes he played, his playing visibly improved – he began to push himself and I could see his confidence growing by the second. Especially when they told him afterwards that if they thought he was no good they just would have stopped playing!
Anyway, excuse the rave – but if anyone is doing anything about setting anything up, or can put me on a mailing list, or needs any help at all with marketing, promotion, organisation or anything – please contact me.